


Ranger

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24811318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: If he keeps to the forests and fields, he'll never be without a home. Shorts & studies honoring Nyx Ulric for nyxulricweek2020!
Comments: 26
Kudos: 16





	1. nature boy.

The orangewood ignited with a fragrant snap, filling the alcove with a faintly citrus-smelling smokiness. The scent was a pleasant addendum for the baser necessity of his situation, a small luxury Nyx wasn’t expecting when he cobbled together the fire. Now that he could settle down within the halo of warmth, he was thankful for the homely aroma. Better than the cloying dampness of the rain outside.

He’d known the storm was coming, but not the swarm of hundlegs. They’d crawled from the Duscaen brush like branches growing from the brambles, cutting in half the time he had to beat the rain to shelter. They hadn’t been a challenge, but the chittering bodies seem to double every time he cleaved one in two. By the time he finished them off, Ramuh was rumbling in warning over his head, and he had to scramble to find dry wood for a fire before the Astral split open the clouds.

Maybe Old Man Ramuh himself had been looking out for him during his mad scramble for kindling, blessing his fire with this little whiff of home. Nyx didn’t regard the Cosmogony as gospel, but of all the Astrals, he’d always figured Ramuh as the most merciful.

“Thanks, I guess,” Nyx said to the hiss of rain.

When he had no one else to talk to, Nyx often talked to the elements. Whether on the rocking tides of his hometown seas or upon the arid climbs of his childhood canyon, he’d always had a dialogue with the world around him. Where the unchecked wilds of Eos often inspired unease in most, Nyx felt most at ease when he was alone in the woods, or atop a cliff, or adrift at sea. Even without a single soul to be seen for miles, he never felt lonely.

A low grumble in the sky responded to Nyx’s gratitude, a surge of wind in the rain tugging at the flames of his campfire. He wasn’t worried about it being snuffed out. He was safe and dry in the mouth of his little cave in the dense pines of Duscae, the last place locals advised him he should be at night. There were goblins in the caves, they said, and giants that came from the ground past moonrise. The roads weren’t safe to travel by night, but Nyx wasn’t worried about the dark. He was just worried about getting wet.

“Hoped I’d beat you to the arches, but…” Nyx shrugged at the bruised sky. “Serves me right for forgetting bug spray.”

The campfire cackled in the breeze, a far more forgiving audience than the gaggle of friends he tried to entertain back home. Nyx leaned his back against the icy stone of the cave mouth and withdrew his phone from his jacket. Best to let those friends know he was still alive on his travels. The lighting wasn’t ideal, but these Crown City cell phones seemed to defy all logic when it came to picture taking. He snapped a sloppy shot of the fire, in bright orange contrast to the dark portal of rain-soaked pines beyond the cave, and sent it off to Libs. He’d share it around the table at Malbo Smul’s, Crowe would make some jab about how Nyx missed his calling as a lumberjack, Pelna would text him from under the table some survivalist article about getting caught in a rainstorm, and if Luche was there, he’d make them all toast Nyx’s continued existence. If Tredd was there, he’d toast to his absence, and Crowe would flick green sauce at his face.

Nyx could have called any one of them to talk to, but right now, he preferred the company of the rain. He liked the laughter of the fire and its smirk of smoked orange perfuming the night. Most times, he didn’t prefer solitude, at least not in his apartment cell in the raucous underbelly of the Insomnian metropolis. As much as he’d wished that he could appreciate the security of the four dingy walls, his blood always pulled him to the world beyond the Wall.

He preferred the dangers of a thunderstorm to the docile drumming of traffic past midnight. He yearned for open fields and endless seas, skies unhindered by the glassy dome of safety over the Crown City. Home was nice, home was where he wanted to be, and one day he hoped Insomnia could be that for him. But right now, he was on leave, and home had no walls, no roof over his head, no warm bed to rest his legs. Home was the pine trees curling against the rain winds, was forks of purple lightning punching through a gray sky, was a cold, dank cave in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to but himself.

“I’m thinking oranges for dinner,” he sighed, bouncing the Duscaen fruit plucked from the branches he’d been able to burn – another little gift. “Since it doesn’t look like you’re gonna end up.”

Another snort of thunder, another chuckle from the fire. He still had a long way to go, and with weather as unpredictable as Lucis’s, he was starting to doubt he’d ever get there. Nyx smiled. Oh well. He might be late getting there, but at least he wouldn’t be lonely along the way.


	2. rebel yell.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Borders never kept Nyx from walking where he wanted to. He's lucky that he's not the only one.

“Ulric.”

“Marshal.”

“Staying into trouble?”

“Yes, sir.”

Cor rolled his eyes, affecting exasperation at the heretical response. Nyx just grinned in passive indifference, adhering to his post as the Marshal marched off to his. He knew not to take it personally. He knew that vexed scowl was just part of the frigid façade put on for the cadets and the Council and the Crownsguard image. He knew the straight line of his grim mouth was just a border dividing who he put on for the masses and who he really was.

Nyx knew because he’d crossed that border, the day he met the famous “Immortal.” He met him the day he dared to breach the unspoken border between Kingsglaive and Crownsguard. It was something he’d been warned about during his first week training, that glaives stuck to their side of the barracks and guards stuck to theirs. There wasn’t any particular reason Nyx could figure out. It was just “how we do things here” – an obnoxious senior Crownsguard had sneered at him once.

That may or may not have been the motivating factor in Nyx deciding to screw the rules and walk into the Crownsguard training yard. Just to see that one old fart blanch and try to remove him. But there really wasn’t any rule against glaives and guards comingling. It was just that some of the Crownsguard disapproved of the newly minted Kingsglaive, and they wanted them all to know it. They wanted them to remember that the Crownsguard had been here first, that they had seniority, and therefore authority. They wanted these scrappy immigrants yapping after the King’s table scraps to remember their opportunities had been paved for them by institutions like the Crownsguard.

Nyx never liked authority, since well before he was displaced to Lucis. And he didn’t believe in these intangible borderlines invented to intimidate him out of exploring. No danger signs had ever kept him from the jungles of Galahd, no fences had ever kept him from leaping through the canyons. A few bitter Crownsguard weren’t going to keep him from seeing how the other side fought.

On the glaive’s side, the barracks were smaller, the training arena a bit more clustered, due mostly to the short notice of the King’s new program. The Citadel hadn’t been prepared for so many refugees to sign on so quickly to the King’s service. That was why it wasn’t as spacious and shiny as the Crownsguard quarters, certainly! It would improve in time! Ten years later and the Kingsglaive side of things looked the same.

Ten years back, when he’d first walked into the Crownsguard barracks, Nyx remembered being angry about how nice it was. How everything was dressed in Lucian tassels and polished with adamantine steel. He remembered fighting with that old Crownsguard – who’d since retired, or died, Nyx never did know (one day, he just wasn’t there anymore) – arguing over his right to be there, entreating with him that he just wanted an hour in their training facilities because there was more space to warp and he wanted to get better. Part of that had been true, but mostly Nyx had been young and arrogant and just wanted a reason to fight.

That was when he met Cor, the crossing guard between the two factions.

“Give it a rest,” he’d said, seeming to slip from the shadows at the corner of Nyx’s eye. “Rosch, go take a walk. You, cadet. Come with me.”

Nyx had thought for sure he’d been following Cor to sign his discharge papers. That maybe there really had been a rule in place against commiserating with the Crownsguard which breaking had hereby exiled him from the Kingsglaive.

But no, Cor took him to the nice, airy training yard reserved for the Crownsguard, where the targets were always cycled in fresh and the blunted weapons for practice were always polished. Cor had gestured at the rack of weapons against the wall, brandishing his sheathed katana.

“You want to train. Let’s train.”

It had been an enlightening practice duel. Nyx had known he was in over his head – he knew this was the legendary Immortal, the King’s very own Marshal. He didn’t strike to win, just to test what he was capable of against a superior opponent. He’d been raw then, a freshly molded blade not yet cooled to steel. He’d been all energy and no restraint, and he was sure he must have made a fool of himself in front of the King’s esteemed colleague.

But he got the space he wanted to flex his new powers and an opponent that gave him the room to do it. By the end of it, Nyx remembered collapsing onto the sandy floor, sweating drenching his shirt, staring up at the clouds through the skylight and finally not feeling so angry that the Crownsguard got such a nice view.

“You’ve got talent, kid,” Cor told him, setting a water bottle by Nyx’s flopped out arm. “But you’ve also got a lot of anger. Control that, and you’re going to make a name for yourself around here.”

“Here?” Nyx had scoffed, then jerked his head in the direction of the Kingsglaive. “Or over there?”

“Here.”

Cor had nodded to the sky, to Insomnia at large, and Lucis beyond it. Kingsglaive and Crownsguard were just two small parts of a greater whole, the borders between them mere lines in the sand ready to be washed away with the first rain of fire that threatened the Crown City.

“What’s your name?” Cor had asked, with an impish smile Nyx hadn’t expected of the severe Lucian Marshal. “I want to know it before everyone else does.”

“Nyx.”

“Cor.”

“I know.”

“You’re going to be trouble, aren’t you Nyx?”

“You bet, sir.”

“Good. Last cadet that made trouble around here started the Crownsguard.”

Nyx learned later about that string bean cadet, the spitfire of the Citadel in way over his head, following at the to-be King’s heels with a smart mouth and a sharp sword. Nyx learned that he wasn’t the only one in Lucis who looked at a warning sign, clearly defining the border of what not to do, and decided, all of a sudden, that he didn’t know how to read.


	3. seafarer.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyx missed sailing, though he'd never been a sailor.

Nyx missed sailing.

Back home, he used to be on the water constantly. He never went too far so, maybe he couldn’t really call it sailing, but he’d been on boats for most of his young adult life. He remembered fishing from the Ostiums’ rusty old cruiser, learning the difference between the tug of the current at the end of his line, and the tug of a fish. He remembered tossing crab cages over the moored vessel and coming back before dawn to haul up succulent crustaceans for a seafood feast.

Sometimes, he remembered just taking a boat to go do nothing at all. Sometimes, he just liked to drift between the islands in the pale gray hours before morning, before even the gulls were awake to herald in the day. Sometimes he went out at night, in the purpling twilight that rippled over the waves in the wake of the fading sunlight. He’d lay on the deck and watch the sky change colors, feel the rise and fall of the sea underneath buoying him like a breath in the water.

He would have never called himself a sailor. He’d been a hunter, a bartender, a marketer of food and drink over the umber hills of Galahd. He’d felt the earth beneath his boots, making tracks across his homeland for the soil to remember. He’d followed the imprints of his people, beaten into the roads for generations before him. He’d walked from one end of the island to the other, leaving footprints upon every inch of burnt-orange canyon and verdant green jungle. He left his mark with the rest of his ancestors, following their footpaths to the same destinations.

The allure of the sea was the fact that no one could leave footprints upon it. There was no end to it, no back and forth, no tracks to follow. When you were on the water, you had to make your own way. As much as he honored the history of his land, when he was younger, the idea of being held to no one’s path but his own had been hard to resist.

That was the siren call of the sea, Granny Ostium would tell him. Folk wrote of figures in the water, singers on the wind, daemons who seduced sailors over the sides of their ships to their doom. But the true siren of the sea wasn’t so fantastical. The call came from within, the siren was always in the sailor, pulling them out to sea. There was as much danger as there was wonder in that endless horizon.

Nyx never drifted too far. In the end, he was a man of the land, moored to his dock by family and friends. The sea was merely a friend next door, inviting him out on his boat every now and again to watch the sky. It always tried to call him farther, tugged on that siren in his chest to come home, but he always weighed anchor back to the shore.

Once that shore was razed to the ground, he thought of giving in to the call. He felt the waves rock the underbelly of the ferry into Insomnia, trying to capsize him into the sea, desperately clawing for him to head to the horizon. He could seize the ship from the ferryman, he could take them all out to sea, to their own way. But he’d had Libs at his side then, an anchor to those distant, chrome piers of Insomnia.

Libs had always been of the land. Libs got seasick every time they went fishing. He was a man of the earth, of tilling soil and raising stock. He would have been a farmer if he hadn’t been forced to become a soldier. There had never been a siren call in him for the sea. He followed the footfalls of the Lucian elite and Nyx followed after him, turning his back on the water. He didn’t mind. He’d never been a sailor.

But he did miss sailing. He missed the temptation of it. It wasn’t for many years until he found his feet on a boat again. Upon the polished boards of the royal vessel, ferrying the Crown Prince on a summer sabbatical to some small coastal borough Nyx had never heard of. He was used to driving the young royal through the avenues of Insomnia – part punishment for whatever slight Nyx had committed against his commanding officer, part reprieve from the toils of the battlefield.

The pull of the horizon was even stronger than it had been in his youth, absence making the call grow fonder for its old friend. But he had a path to follow, shorelines to keep to, and he couldn’t very well turn the royal vessel out to open sea and vanish with the Crown Prince. At least, not unless he was ordered to.

“Hey,” Noct said, sidling up to the controls. “You feel like taking a detour?”

“Is that really wise, Your Highness? Able to get lost out here if you’re not careful.”

“That’s the idea.”

Nyx couldn’t very well deny royalty his call to the sea.


	4. hills & home.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> home had never been four walls and rooftop.

Coming home felt like leaving home.

In his head, home was four walls and a roof over his head. Home was where he rarely made his bed, with his armchair set to rest his bones, where he had running water and food in his cupboards. His low district apartment was a shelter from the rains and snows and sun which cycled through the seasons of Insomnia. It was a space for him to survive, to lick his wounds after the end of every ranging beyond the Wall. It kept him alive.

But in his heart, home was different.

In his heart, home was never the building he kept coming back to. It was only when he walked out the door that he ever felt like he was going home. Because his home had no walls – no rent – no moorings within the steel-and-glass dome of the Crown City. Home wasn’t the raucous babble of car horns racing him along the sidewalk, not the routine marches around the gilded spires of the Citadel, nor the stale air of the barracks made more tepid by the muttered swears and weary laughter of his comrades.

No, in his heart, he went home every time he stepped off the trucks that ferried him past border security. Once he felt unpaved earth yield beneath the soles of his boots, he was home. Once he took his first gulp of arid Lucian air and didn’t taste gasoline on the wind, he was there.

The wild had always been his home, even in Galahd. He’d loved his mother’s house, felt safe and welcomed between its clay walls, but in his youth the crawl of nighttime brought with it something of a dread. Not of the dark and not of the inevitable return to his house, but of the disappointment that his adventure of the day was over. That he had to abandon his quest through the salt-spattered coves of the bayside, or the tangles of roots in the jungle, or the steep climbs of the canyons.

When he was young, he’d never wanted to go back inside. He’d been a wild little thing, as unruly as the red chocobos of the steppes. Once he was coaxed back to the house by the lure of steaming food and a warm bed, he would stay awake for hours, humming with the instinct to break free of the walls and run across the unhindered hills of Galahd.

Now that he was older, with a strange and wondrous new power singing in his veins, he felt those old urgencies stir in him again, every time he saw the unfiltered sky of Lucis. Every time he looked up the sun to find it unobscured by the eerie toll of the Wall’s light, he felt his blood race. Every time he cast his gaze across the hinterlands and saw only stone and trees and grass for miles, he felt the land call him home.

It may not have been his land – not the soil of his ancestors, not the blood of his people – but nations and territories and places with names never truly mattered to him much. Maybe that made him unpatriotic, disloyal; unable to be held to one culture. He’d warred with that part of him ever since he’d made the voyage to Insomnia. But maybe it had nothing to do with feeling displaced. Maybe he’d just never been anchored to one home.

He belonged to the world, not to lines drawn on maps and men building walls to keep him contained. He belonged to the sunrise of every day’s adventure, to the untamed wilderness, to boundless horizons. It was worth the dangers he was thrown into beyond the Wall. It was worth the ache in his muscles, the callouses on his hands, and the blood on his brow, fighting through the machines that sought to segment it all, brand and bottle it to sell to their frightened followers.

Sometimes the battle wasn’t worth it, not when they felt the loss of those glaives that didn’t get up after the fight. But sometimes, when he was sitting on the cliffs overlooking Cleigne or the havens tucked within Duscae, with Libs and Crowe at his side watching the sun rise on them for another adventure, it felt like it was worth it. To Nyx, that unfiltered sunrise, unburdened by a skyline, by magic, by politics or war, was worth the fight.

It always felt like going home.


	5. desperate feathers.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When technology fails, go the old fashioned way.

“This calls for desperate measures.”

Nyx gave the back fender of the truck a rough kick for daring to die on him. That wasn’t his desperate measure, but it made him feel a little better. Enacting violence on an inanimate object was a healthy way to seek catharsis, wasn’t it? The damn thing deserved it – truck had some nerve crapping out on him in the middle of nowhere. Though he supposed it served him right for hotwiring the first rust bucket he saw on the side of the road that actually had tires.

Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and right now, he was begging for a miracle, but he wasn’t counting on a second one. The first was getting him out of Nif clutches in the first place. It wasn’t the first nor the last time he’d been captured for questioning by the opposing army. Fortunately, he’d been able to afford escape before they got him too far back over Lucian borders for torture. Unfortunately, he had no means of communication on his person, no idea where he was, and now, no more transportation to outrun a possible pursuant.

The truck had been a gamble, crushed against the back roads of Cleigne as he made a mad warp dash from the airship. It had been abandoned for a reason, surely it wasn’t going to turn on, but with a little electric oomph from his magic and the hotwiring he’d learned in his more rebellious youth, Nyx managed to get it working. It must have been on its last dregs of gas when it died, because it gave him just enough to pull a head start on the Nifs and lose himself in the dense greenery of Lucian territory.

Then it died its second death. Which he knew was going to happen. He was still annoyed about it, but he knew it was going to happen. There was no way it would have gotten him all the way back home, but he had hoped it would at least get him to an outpost so he could find a phone and call for extraction.

Now, he was on his own, on foot, and on his last nerve. It was a chilly night on the edge between Cleigne and Duscae, daemons whispering in the dark all around him. He walked fast, kukris out, magic recharged and ready to fight his way to shelter. He would definitely need another miracle to see him through the night. He wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: the daemons getting him or the Nifs.

Either way, he walked a while unmolested by the threats of the night. Either there were more tantalizing morsels wandering the roads at night, or he was just lucky. Maybe he smelled too much like MT and daemons didn’t like that. He didn’t question it, just walked, briskly along the paved roads until he found light.

The first light he saw was like a ray of heaven. It was a streetlamp and it was broken but it beamed down on his savior – not from on high, from a farm somewhere. There was an outpost up ahead, and along its edge a chocobo stood sentry, waiting for its renter to ride out again. The animal was awake and alert, preening its feathers in the stuttering street light, waiting for sunrise.

“Hey, bud,” Nyx greeted it as he limped up to the outpost.

The chocobo looked at him, head cocked, eyes blinking. He offered it a light pat on the neck as he passed. Phone call first, then grand theft chocobo. There was a payphone by the gas station and loose change littered between the pumps, fallen from hasty hands and left to the crevices of the concrete. Fortunate though that was, he unfortunately could not get into contact with the elite secret organization of magic knights to come and get him. He kept getting redirected and redirected again and redirected back to the same operator confused as to what all these codes meant.

He didn’t want to steal the chocobo, but he was desperate. At least whoever rented it had a place to stay the night. Nyx didn’t have a penny to his name and he wanted to get the hell back into Insomnia jurisdiction. He was tired, he was hungry, he was a little scared though he told himself he wasn’t, and maybe the bird sensed all of that in him, because it didn’t give him a single squawk of dissent as he approached.

“Hope you got better mileage than the last one, buddy,” Nyx muttered as he hauled himself into the saddle. “We’ve got a ways to go.”


End file.
